Computer networks, and computer servers within the networks, have become backbones of companies throughout the world. Even if a company does not provide products or services over the internet, computer networks within the company improve employee productivity by providing employees with instantaneous access to millions of bytes of data. In fact, many companies are unable to function when the company's computer network fails. Thus, it is imperative that companies have reliable computer networks with 99.999% up time.
One conventional solution to improving the uptime of computer servers is to automate response to operating system messages. An operating system executing on a computing system may generate informational, warning, and/or error messages during operation of the computer. The system messages may contain information about an error that is or has occurred on the computing system. The system messages may also contain information about events occurring that may suggest an error is about to occur. Responding to these system messages allows computer downtime to be reduced by taking action to correct or avert errors.
A scripting system may allow automation of response to the system messages. That is, an administrator, rather than manually monitoring the computing system 24/7, may write scripts that perform certain actions in response to certain system messages and/or certain combinations of system messages. One example of this scripting is the UNISYS Autoaction Message System (AMS). These scripts improve computing system uptime by allowing template responses to certain events to resolve problems without an administrator's input.
However, the operating system messages may change as the operating system is updated over time. The changing of system messages may require an update to the scripts. For example, the scripts may refer to an operating system message that has changed or been deleted with an operating system update.
In one conventional solution, an administrator may manually examine existing scripts and the list of new or changed operating system messages to identify issues in the scripts before they were encountered in production. An individual skilled in the scripting syntax needed to be made aware of the changed operating system messages and would spend time looking through the automation scripts for potential issues. This was time-consuming, not guaranteed to expose all issues, and required the time of highly-skilled support personnel. Because there may be many of these scripts, updating the scripts may take a large amount of administrator time. Further, during the time between the change of the system messages and the updating of the scripts the computing system may experience an error that is no longer handled by the scripts. This may cause unanticipated downtime in the computing system.